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By Rosalba O’BrienReuters • Tuesday February 12, 2013 5:32 AM

LONDON — As much a part of the saucier side of British 20th-century life as cheeky seaside
postcards and innuendo-loaded comedies, the topless models in Britain’s best-selling daily paper
might soon be no more.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose
Sun has featured a large picture of a bare-breasted model on Page 3 since 1970, has
indicated that it might be time for a change in tack. The 81-year-old Australian, responding to a
tweet saying, “Seriously, we are all so over Page 3 — it is so last century!” wrote: “You may be
right, don’t know but considering. Perhaps halfway house with glamorous fashionistas.”

The exchange coincided with the latest in what have been perennial campaigns against Page 3,
this time spurred in part by a public sense that the mass-circulation press, tainted by scandal, is
too powerful and should be reined in.

The “No More Page Three” campaign sent an open letter signed by more than 50 members of
Parliament to Dominic Mohan, editor of the
Sun.

“We want to live in a society where the most widely read newspaper is one that respects women,”
read the letter, posted on the campaign’s website.

“Instead, the Sun publishes Page 3, which reduces women to objects. It reduces men to
objectifiers. And it reduces this country to one that upholds 1970s sexist values. We’re better
than this.”

During an inquiry into press standards last year — one prompted by a phone-hacking scandal that
forced the closing of the
Sun’s sister Sunday paper, the
News of the World — Mohan said the photos “celebrate natural beauty.”

“We’re allowed to publish those images, and I think it’s become quite an innocuous British
institution where, as a parent myself, I’m more concerned about images that my children might come
across on the Internet or on digital devices,” he said.

Printing pictures of semi-naked women to boost circulation was copied by other British
mass-circulation papers and newspapers in other countries, although many have since stopped doing
so.